the body | the city
The body in the city acts as vessel; to carry, contain and interact; forming routes and navigations through the immediacies of its encounter. The body in the city becomes a means to extend the discourses of the mind and architecture to a frontal physical plane. The experience of the body as it moves through its decided and undecided routes of the complex labyrinth becomes synthesis; forming in such modes of encounter a reflection as to the physical landscape it temporally habits.
To consider the body an artifice for reflection as to the affects of urbanisation; modern progress and development allows a humanist discourse to form around the concrete slabs which form the densely textured urban scene. How the body is positioned in space; how it occupies and passes through various plaza, streets and passage ways can function as means for discourse as to the nature of affect the city may have on the psychology of urban human behaviour and simultaneously affords insight as to how the city is formed and cemented by the very patterns which human occupancy projects. This mutual dialectical relationship becomes synonymous to concepts as to how far cities are designed for people and how people essentially redesign and augment the fabric of urban texture. The embodiment of the urban experience by the human form becomes focus for this research; how far can the body enter a state of conscious reflection as to its use and positioning within the built environment to observe and how can such conscious observations be then potentially be reapplied to generate shifts in land use patterning and generate possible realms of progress within discourses of spatial planning.
‘Nature is man’s inorganic body.. ( that) man lives on Nature means that nature of his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die.’ [1]
[1] Marx. K. 1964 P112. Sourced in Terrence. T. Bodies and Anti-Bodies. Flesh and Festish in Contemporary Social Theory. in Csordas. T ( ed) ( 1994) Embodiment and Experience. The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. P 27
Urban re:passages 